News Is When The Man Bites The Dog And Not The Other Way Round by Apostle Femi Lazarus: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

The Deliberate Architecture of Africa's Narrative

When a terrorist attack happens in the United States, international media will not show blood. They will not show a dead body. When the same kind of attack happens in Kenya or anywhere in Africa, they show everything. This is not inconsistency. It is policy — applied selectively and deliberately.

A former BBC correspondent confirmed this from personal experience: working for the BBC, he never once saw a dead body shown in any story covering violence in the West. But if it happened in Africa, the footage ran unedited.

There is a deliberate narrative architecture at work in the media space. The intention when Western and international media come to Africa is consistent: go to the spaces where there is extreme poverty; photograph hungry children, naked children, malnourished children with swollen bellies; show how poor Africa is.

A young YouTuber named iShowSpeed traveled through the continent and streamed his experience. The comments from people who had never visited Africa — including Black Americans who assumed Africa was a monolithic struggling place — were astonished to find modernity, high-rise buildings, escalators, tarmacked roads, electric cars, happy people full of their culture. Many said they wanted to return to their motherland.

The image painted of Africa is a strategic construction — designed to demarket the continent, to obscure its wealth, and to justify continued exploitation while maintaining the appearance of aid.

The First Lesson in Journalism

The first lesson taught in journalism training: news is when a man bites a dog, not the other way around. That is the foundational introduction to what constitutes news — the bizarre, the morbid, the sad. If a story does not contain those elements, it struggles to be considered news at all.

This produces exactly what it is designed to produce. The top four stories on any given news broadcast will likely include a corruption scandal, a killing, people dying of hunger somewhere, or a combination of all three. This normalizes and numbs — training the audience to receive death, despair, destruction, and poverty as the default reality of the world.

When that framing is applied specifically to Africa, it becomes a system of active perception management: justify the need for "help" with one hand while extracting with the other.